Zuko Garagić’s speculative, historical-biographical films, pursue what he calls “archives of the imagined.” Through setting “dead facts” in the present, foregrounding the mediation between past and present, he looks to question whether history is a vast repository teeming with answers, a refuse heap of discarded dreams, or a bottomless pit that swallows all specificity? He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and earned his MFA from Columbia University, where he also taught film as a Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor. Zuko is also a PhD Student at the University of Chicago.
Zuko is currently in development on two feature films: one a documentary about European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to fight in the American Civil War, lured by the promise of citizenship, the second a narrative on Bosnian assimilation in the Czech Republic. He is also in post-production on his second creative hybrid short, centred on a Czech-Italian journalist and the unresolved deaths of Roma individuals in the Czech Republic in the late 90s.
